


to those she persecutes

by gogollescent



Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: F/F, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, sitting in a tree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:11:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly, Lea, unconventional training techniques. Spoilers for <i>Ghost Story</i>; originally written for the kinkmeme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to those she persecutes

Lea doesn’t look anything like her.

It’s funny. Wearing rags, it turns out, is almost as good as her sleekest veils; people don’t see her, when she comes to them in half a poncho and the rent remains of three cableknit sweaters, or in layered dresses that hang together like the complex petals of a rose. They can’t see her for holes.

This one time, she ends up on the subway, sitting next to a girl she used to kiss at parties and share homework with. She has on a quilted jacket that hangs wrong on her, and leaks stuffing; underneath, one of Daniel’s old dress shirts. There are buttons missing; the shirt gapes in places, baring diamonds of pale skin. Not tantalizing, these days. Just ugly. Frightening, maybe, in how bleak and unashamed it looks, the bruising on her sternum peeking out like some dark eye.

The other girl spends ten minutes pretending not to stare. Her looks never rise far enough to skim the side of Molly’s face; there’s never any shift in how she holds herself, no glimmer of shock. Only fascination, horror. Bland disgust. 

But hey, Molly thinks. Fair’s fair. Molly can’t remember her name.

So: invisible. Protected by other people’s blindness. Shielded wherever she shows skin. The Rag Lady, whose face bears no relationship to her title. It makes sense that people— her friends, her victims, her inherited enemies— believe the trick.

But Lea meets her in the silence of the park, her hair burning under its torn net, and Molly can’t help but despair, a little, when she remembers that they share a kind of name. Lea, in the splay of a blooming tree, green shadows mobile on her white face, looks like everything she is: the long-limbed extrusion of another world into here. Her hair is bound in the cast-offs of some retired cafeteria lady and it shines like Mars before bloodshed. Her hands lie half-lost in the woolly depths of the kind of fingerless mittens that were out of fashion before they were designed; the curl of her thumbs is precise and murderous. 

Her skirts, she’s hitched up to bare one white leg almost to the hip. 

When Molly was a little younger, she compared herself to the girls in her class who were really beautiful, the ones who didn’t need to kiss other girls to get a whistle or a glance. She was meticulous, and good at it: she made lists, in her head, of all the shifting ways in which she didn’t measure up. Later, she would learn that such scrupulous quantification of the unquantifiable was a hallmark of neuromancers and poets. But in those days the hobby held no connotations. 

She doesn’t compare herself to Lea. She doesn’t dare. She finds herself, instead, noting without choosing to the places at which they converge.

“Come here, child,” says Lea. Lea’s mouth changes shape easy as the slide of wine. 

Molly says nothing. She goes. The pain in her leg— mostly faded, these days, to a luminous twinge— flares.

There have been times when Lea chose a high place so that she could toss fire at Molly, in white arcs; the Winter kind of fire, which passes out of the realm of measurable temperature, hot or cold, into the featureless extremes of pain. Molly has her shields up, hissing a little but secure; Molly is ready for fire, if it comes.

But Lea sits, legs crossed at the ankle, a prim gesture that she turns obscene. Lea smiles without moving. Molly isn’t sure she’s ever been this afraid. Not even when— 

“Say rather that your fear has never been this lovely,” says Lea, and, smiling, offers her a hand.

Molly stops.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” she says. 

“No,” says Lea. “I know you are.”

And Molly doesn’t have any answer to that. Harry probably would have. Somehow the silence that follows seems to corroborate the idea: it has a mocking edge, a sense of space unfilled.

“You’re just going to drop me,” she says, eventually.

“Maybe,” says Lea. Her eyes gleam like lost coins. “What can you do about it?”

“Fall,” says Molly, without thinking. 

She knows she’s right as soon as she’s said it.  _Right_ , in some meaningless way that nevertheless settles over her like one whole thing, utterly separate from the shreds she glues to her skin. 

Lea laughs. The curve of her exposed throat is a false cognate: vulnerability redefined as sudden death.

“So fall,” says Lea, and Molly blinks, and just like that she’s straddling the branch Lea sits at the root of. 

“You—” she begins.

“You,” says Lea, her voice closing around Molly’s like a hand, “owe me a favor, little one.”

Molly stares at her.

“Or,” says the Leanansidhe, “didn’t you want to come up?”

Between her thighs, the branch is solid and cool. Sunlight dapples Lea’s cheekbone, paints her cheek like the flank of a deer. Her eyes are wide and heavy with gathered gold, the long pupils dividing light from light.

Molly becomes aware that there is... an invitation, in the slight dilation of those ancient cat pupils.

It’s, unarguably, stupid. But:

She pushes in through the door, riding her will and the gravity of a glance.

She remembers the boys who watched her when she kissed girls at parties, the weight of their gaze. It’s that old shameless path she retraces now, down and down, into— 

_mirrors, the pure reflexive chill of ice backed by dark water, and solid sheets of light like burning snow, and her own face: Molly Carpenter, fleshless and purple-haired, with eyes like the shadows on frost, with her open raw hands full of borrowed dreams_

_mirrors, the blue-red heart of an infinite regression, and all around her power in fine unerring lines_

_mirrors_

_(How could we not, between us, need a name?)_

  
Lea’s mouth is cold. She tastes like the darkness below mountains, like water that has never seen the sun. It does not, for three long seconds, occur to Molly to think: I am kissing the Leanansidhe, or, I miss him, or,  _where no man has gone before, baby._

Three seconds: they pass like seasons. 

Lea tangles her hand in Molly’s hair, and rests her other palm between them. Her fingers cup the patchwork exposure of Molly’s stomach in a broken benediction.

Molly feels —

That's not the point. The point is: all seasons end.

“The debt is paid,” says Lea, when Molly has finished wiping at her lips. The dry air chafes them.

Molly runs her tongue along her teeth, and tries too hard to breathe.

“Fine,” she says. "In that case, can we begin the fucking lesson?”

This time, the laughter pours out softly, drifting to earth.

“Take my hand,” says Lea. After a moment’s hesitation, Molly does.

Their fingers, as it turns out, fit like a closing trap.


End file.
